Music. For people with ears.

This is probably my favourite song on the album looking back now. I wouldn’t change a thing about it which is quite rare. It features a lass called Tallie singing on it who, at the time, was playing in a now-defunct band around Portsmouth called Plat Du Jour. It also has some beautiful viola and cello from two ladies named Ruth and Sophie that Matt knew from Red Campion, another fantastic and much missed local band of the era. It’s the strings that really do bring the piece to life for me. For that reason we’ve hardly ever played it live. Maybe once or twice? I remember we definitely did it at our album launch where for some reason we dressed up in Miami Vice clothes.

I’d demoed it previously with horrible MIDI strings that I think Neil and Pauly B (trumpeter extraordinaire ex DC now RSP) scored out properly for the girls. I also loved the guitar sound from the demo so much that we lifted it straight out of that session…caused a few timing issues did that….but challenging things are often worth doing eh?

There were loads of different snare drums sitting about in the studio and Matt recorded tons of the blighters in different locations about the place to get different sounds and reverb which we then layered up. Some even upside down in a stairwell if memory serves.

It was also a fella introduced to me through Matt that designed the front cover for the album…Stephen ‘Pinny’ Olden. A fine artist he is too.

I did actually used to love drawing treasure maps as a kid. On beer mats apparently. In pub beer gardens with family and friends it seems. Plain and simple.

Looking online it seems someone liked the song enough to post it on Youtube with an image of a foot. The internet eh? Crazy.

This is such a beautiful song, and has grown into one of my favourites on the album.

A couple of days after you announced the band were splitting up, we were listening to the album on a journey to Cornwall. The line that goes something like, ‘This could be the last story, before the light goes out…’ seemed to leap out of the song, and I swear we’d never heard the ‘…for good’ at the end of it before. It was like you had somehow changed it this time! It was a very poignant moment.